Watch out for Piranha!

My wife has been looking for old arcade games for several weeks now. Her parents had (actually, have, since it still sits in my MIL's garage) a VERY old pinball machine when she was growing up, and she wants some similar toys in the house as our daughters get older. So when she called last week to tell me she had a lead on a machine in Manassas, it wasn't a surprise. I came home from work last Friday to find an arcade video game machine set up in our big family room. The game is called Piranha, and its basically a rip-off of Pac-Man. The case is pretty beat-up, and the screen has some serious burned-in patterns, but it worked. Or at least it did for the first day. Within 24 hours of taking possession of this "as-is" machine, the monitor no longer worked. The game itself was still working (judging from the sound effects), but it is impossible to play when you can't see what is happening.

We called the guy that sold it to us. He runs a business fixing up old arcade games, and after he decided we weren't trying to get our money back, he was quite helpful in providing diagnostic suggestions. Finally, this evening, I found the blown fuse on the monitor board, and tracked down a local electronics parts store that should be able to sell us a replacement. The total cost to repair the machine should be less than $10. The store isn't open on weekends, to final repairs are on hold until next week. In the meantime, I've been flipping through the book of schematics I found inside the machine, and I now know how to change the settings for the machine, and I'll be able to disable the coin box, so we won't need to keep a box of change next to the machine to use it!